Fusion-io Breaks 1 Million IOPS with ioDrive Octal

For as long as there has been PCI Express-based solid-state drives, there has been Fusion-io. The company first emerged a couple of years ago to a huge amount of uncertainty. It was delivering a product no one was sure of, but it didn’t take long before others, including OCZ Technology on the enthusiast side, took the same plunge and vowed their support.

In the enterprise, Fusion-io reigns supreme, and offers SSDs so expensive, that the company rarely discloses the prices. Some models are sure to exceed $50,000, and even modest models will cost more than most high-end desktop PCs. Though there are some caveats to the drives, a major upside is the sheer performance that others could only dream of delivering.

Though Fusion-io has held the crown in raw IOPS performance for as long as I can remember, the company has outdone itself with its recent launch of the ioDrive Octal. “Octal”, you ask? That refers to the number of channels available, which in this case is eight. The card consists of eight sections loaded with fast MLC or SLC NAND flash, and with that, the card can achieve read speeds of up to 6.2GB/s and write speeds of up to 6.0GB/s.

Note that we’re talking about gigabytes here, not gigabits. At these speeds, you could write 1TB worth of data in 2m 46s, which is without question jaw-dropping. For IOPS performance, Fusion-io touts over 1,000,000 for the Octal, which is a staggering 8.3x OCZ’s very fast RevoDrive X2 – also a PCI Express product.

Of course, one of these is much more affordable than the other. One requires you to open up your wallet, while the other could force you to move out on the street. What I’m interested in seeing is if OCZ plans to go the extreme high-end route for the enterprise in the future, or if it’s going to stick with more “modest” offerings. Given the demand from huge companies out there, it’s hard to say.

NEW ORLEANS – November 15, 2010 – At Supercomputing 2010, Fusion-io announced that it has once again achieved the highest Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and bandwidth in the industry, demonstrating the company’s continued leadership in flash-based, server-attached storage-class memory. The metrics behind these performance achievements are untouched by any other solid-state or traditional disk-based technology on the market today.